


Echo (echo)

by Nonbinaryscary



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Doomed Timelines, F/F, sad kids crying about their sad lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-07 01:59:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1114194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nonbinaryscary/pseuds/Nonbinaryscary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She laughs bitterly. “You really aren’t my Rose, are you? My aim must be worse than I thought.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echo (echo)

You see her walking aimlessly outside your window, a shadow against the dark blue backdrop of an early night, and though you don’t recall ever having met this girl you think you want to. You put away the writing you had been trying to finish, pull on gloves, and step out into the cold upstate New York night. You’re trying to decide how to address her (sternly, asking why she’s on your property? helpfully, asking if she’s lost?) when she sees you, and calls out to you before you can say a word.

“Rose? Rose!” and now she is running towards you and you are unsure how to respond, “Is that really you? I’ve missed you so much.”  
And she hugs you. You start and stiffen up, unsure of why this stranger knows your name, is so excited to see you. She pulls away, looks you in the face, and her face is wet with red, alien tears. She narrows her eyes a little, thinking, making calculations. Then she sighs.

“Do you remember me? You don’t, do you.” A tiny flicker of hope darts through her eyes. “I’m Aradia? Aradia Megido? Does that sound like anyone you know?”

You finally find enough of your voice to say “No.” She looks almost annoyed, and the part of you that’s still semi-reasonable wonders if that’s for you or for her. The rest of you, the part that decided to run outside to greet a stranger, realizes that it’s cold, and that she seems interesting, and that you didn’t really have any plans tonight anyway, and you make a decision then and there.

“Would you like to come inside? We could probably make a little more sense of this situation if we were warm.”

She smiles, through her increasingly worn-out looking face, and says that that sounds nice.

***  
Inside, you offer her tea. It is fascinating to watch her consume it. She tries at first to take large, adventurous gulps of this liquid that only recently stopped boiling, but quickly learns that smaller sips are better suited to the task. It’s not until you’ve been watching her (incidentally very pretty) mouth for several minutes that you realize that you have, in fact, been watching her drink. Internally flushing, you try to kick-start the conversation.

“So, Aradia. Where do you come from? I am given to believe that you’re not native to New York, though that could be an egregious error in judgment on my part, in which case I apologize. Profusely.”

You are worried now that your blushing is more visible than you thought; you intended to stop talking about twenty words before you actually did, and if you can’t control your mouth than how can you possibly be controlling your face? But she doesn’t seem to have thought anything of it; she nods earnestly and starts telling you something about planets. 

She tells you that you’re from earth (which you knew), and that she’s from another planet (which you could have guessed), but then she starts telling a story about twelve other planets, each one belonging to a friend of hers, and you have to ask her to stop because you can’t keep up with this volley of new information. She stops in her tracks, red-clad arms still suspended in wide gesticulation, and looks at you closely for the second time this night.

“Sgrub. Sburb, it was called on Earth. The planets were a construct of the game. Didn’t your session have that?”

“My session of what? I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She laughs bitterly. “You really aren’t my Rose, are you? I misaimed _badly_.”

You stare back at her, blankly, until she starts to speak again.

“Let me tell you the short version. There was this game called Sgrub that my friends and I played. It started out by causing the end of the world, which sounds bad, and actually was pretty bad, but if you played the game all the way through you created a new world and you got to go live in it. Every player is assigned a planet that they live on and do quests on during the course of the game, and they’re also assigned a title, like ‘Witch of Life’ or ‘Mage of Doom’ or something like that. I’m the Maid of Time.” She exhales and smiles, just a little. “I was really good at the Time business! So good that I became a god! That’s something that can happen in Sgrub.”

You nod as though this makes sense.

“But. Something went really wrong with our session. Some people did the wrong things, and we never made it to the end of the game.” She looks up at you with a mirthless grin, and you notice for the first time that her eyes are solid white.

“We met some people from another planet, though. They were playing the same game but in a different universe, and some wires got crossed and we were able to talk to them with our chat client. I got… close, to one of them.”

You know who it was before she says it.

“That was you, Rose. Or at least, a different universe’s version of you. And after everything went bad in my timeline I started looking through all of the other doomed timelines looking for her, but I’ve been looking for sweeps,” 

She’s started to cry, (for the second time that night, you really are a terrible host),

“And I can’t find you, or Feferi or Sollux or Tavros or even Vriska, at least, not the ones I’m looking for, and now I’m telling all of this to someone who hasn’t ever even played the game, and I’m starting to wonder if Rose’s timeline wasn’t the one that won, and if I’m not selfish for still looking and maybe even hoping just a little that it wasn’t, I just miss her so much that I can’t even breathe right.”

She inhales and takes a few seconds to calm herself, taking a drink of her now-lukewarm tea. 

You are trying to think of something to say but you are for the first time in your life without words, and you are almost grateful when she finally starts to speak again:

“This is going to sound a little odd, after all this, but, would you mind if I kissed you? I promise I’m not just trying to use you as a substitute, or anything, it’s just that you’ve been very nice to me and I’d like to pay you back.”

You blush and you know it’s visible, and you want so much to say yes to her but at the same time, she is so fragile and you don’t know if it would be right. You summon up the best excuse available. 

“I think my mother might be home soon.” You say, sure in the rightness of your words, your decision. But when you glance at her to see her response, she looks at you like she is very far away.

“Rose,” she says slowly, “Your mother, she hasn’t been here for a very long time, has she?”

You stare at her for a long moment with a horror you can’t place. Behind her, you see as if for the first time that the shelves, statues, every horizontal surface, is covered with dust. You look away, into your tea, trying to take some refuge, and you see your reflection in it, and you see…

Your eyes are stark white against the dark color of your skin, as white as hers, and you are beginning to remember a lot of things that you had forgotten.

***  
 _Your mother is on the ground, spread inside-out all over. You are still for whole seconds before the need for vengeance that you aren’t strong enough to deliver tears through you, into you, out your mouth and into the starry void. Your scream meets the ears of gods. Offers are made, then negotiations, and by the time it is over there is darkness curling in and around you. It presses harshly into your mind and soul but it takes away your weakness._

_You grow larger than the universe that holds you and like a chrysalis, like an eggshell, like a window or a dropped glass or a woman with blonde hair and magenta eyes torn open and laid out for the sky to see, it breaks. You have dissolved your own world and you don’t understand what for._

_The shadows leave, and you can’t remember why you let them in in the first place._

***  
You can’t take it, you can’t process all of these memories at once, and you don’t even say goodbye to Aradia as you run out the door. You don’t know what you plan to do but you can’t stay inside that dead house. Outside, you stop for breath, leaning against a tall pine tree, and you look up to the sky in an attempt to remind yourself that you are small, but you don’t see stars there. A soap-bubble shimmer stretches in the sky over you, and it is close enough that you can see its curvature, like the edge of the atmosphere. There is the sound of something dripping onto the fallen leaves under you and you realize that you are crying.

Aradia has followed you outside, and you turn to look at her. She looks up at the sky. 

“This is one of the smallest dream bubbles I’ve ever been in. Your memories didn’t supply it with much, did they?” She smiles at you, gently. “I think there were a lot of things you didn’t want to remember. I understand.” 

She takes a step towards you, and you are no longer scared of the memories coming to you. It goes against your nature to reject knowledge completely. You are starting to understand why you’re where you are. Why she’s here with you.

“I think you might be my Rose after all.”

“I think that might be the case.” You reply, and take her hand, gently. It is a degree warmer than yours, and it feels like life.  
“Would you like to go to a dream bubble a little bigger than this? It would be a shame not to see as much of the multiverse as we can.”  
You squeeze her hand, and tell her that that sounds nice.

***  
 _Before shadows, before bright red spilt new over the ground, there was another kind of red painted over your computer screen. She is brighter than a new star and twice as warm and you want so much to hold her hand. She is universes away. You are prepared to wait._

**Author's Note:**

> "As long as you remember her, you are not alone..."  
> WAIT that's the wrong fandom sorry.
> 
> This is the first (serious) fanfic I've ever posted anywhere, so I hope it makes enough sense to be enjoyable.
> 
> My blog is at nonbinaryscary.tumblr.com, so hit me up if you have any requests for fics or something, I'm always looking for ideas!


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